Mission Statement

The Push Pops are a radical, transnational queer feminist art collective. Geared toward engendering ‘Embodied Feminism,’ Go! Push Pops employs the female body – that which is bound to a cross-cultural language of desire, signification and power – in tactical, ideological strategy. Go! Push Pops utilize gesture, exclamation and popular idiom to embody a new age discursive physicality interfacing with the ancient archetypal realm. Neo-Dada, Fluxist and Feminist, their performance work posits the body as a danger to the operation of reason and patriarchal economy of lack. A wild leap, an elusive slogan, a paroxysm of the flesh – The Push Pops reinscribe the body through participatory ritual, spontaneous performance and interactive multi-media installation.

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Monday, December 20, 2010

Trapped behind tacky animal print bed sheets in a symbolic pen visible only through small ripped holes, The Pops play dress up with female/animal archetypes: A drunken fox-hipster-sorority girl-artist lost in perpetual Spring Break. A Feminist warlord shooting vitriol through the tip of a mop. A Unicorn phone sex operator singing with a banana shoved down her throat. An angry bunny eating an entire cake as she reads angrily from ‘He’s Just Not that Into You.’ Vengeance, anger, distress and anxiety surged amidst broken domestic items, overturned living room furniture, decadent food, seasonal foliage and loads of animal kitsch. In the center, a glowing television loops a collage of imagery including clips from ‘Girls Gone Wild,’ animal sex, professional hair removal, amateur strippers, relaxation tapes and sissy nobby. Meanwhile on the other side of the curtain, master of the tidy kitchen and the smug voice of patriarchy: a handsome gentleman wielding a riding crop and a gaudy animal fur cap hurls his sexist jargon into the mix. Part ‘Theater of Cruelty’ part Brechtian ‘Learning Play,’ Push Pops Gone Wild is a platform for empathic learning. Throughout the 7-hour performance The Push Pops reach various points of internal combustion - erupting into catfights, crying, singing, chirping, growling, screeching. Possibilities of contact always in flux, mobile, electric, pluralities of identity emerge and destruct. Occasionally The Pops enter less abrasive territory – loudly plotting the feminist apocalypse in 2012 runs into merrily singing a few rounds of ‘In the Jungle.’ Each new vignette abruptly ruptured by the delirious, rising jouissance of the next improvisational incarnation.Occasionally, The Pops ear ringing antics push spectators into activity – throwing glitter, confetti and toy ponies through the looking hole, some even yelling back. Push Pops Gone Wild explores ‘play’ as a stimulator of the deterritorialization of bodies and representational codes.

Push Pops Gone Wild was held at 88 Starr St. in Bushwick, Brooklyn on November 14, 2010 as part of the Arts in Bushwick Beta Spaces Festival.

Monday, November 29, 2010

It’s Bushwick gone wild as area becomes a big art show on Sunday

BY AARON SHORT, The Brooklyn Paper

Ever wonder where all the artists in Brooklyn are moving to these days? That would be Bushwick — where another arts festival is set to command your attention on Sunday.

Beta Spaces, a free one-day arts festival sponsored by the all-volunteer group Arts in Bushwick, consists of more than 50 group exhibitions from neighborhood artists all encompassed between three subway stops on the Williamsburg-Bushwick border.

That freewheeling spirit has generated a lively mix of shows each with its own theme that include a pile of metal, rubber and plastic scraps that experimental musicians use to make music, a mystical alleyway on Forrest Street filled with performance artists and trees, and a female arts collective called the Push Pops leading an “aerobic utopia,”“The festival provides an opportunity for inexperienced curators to try something for the first time, said Arts in Bushwick’s Ali Aschman, who curated her own show, “The Box Which Contains the World” at Brooklyn Fire Proof. “We’ll accept anybody as long as they are within the parameters we set. We don’t turn anyone away.”

“For ‘Push Pops Gone Wild,’ we’re talking about a woman’s right to be fierce and nasty, her right to embrace wild free love,” said Push Pops founding member Katie Cercone.

Beta Spaces events will be throughout Williamsburg and Bushwick mostly around the Morgan Street L train, Nov. 14 noon–7 pm. For info,www.artsinbushwick.org

BETA Spaces (Bushwick Exhibition Triangle of Alternative Spaces) is a free one-day festival conceptualized and thematic group exhibitions on Sunday November 14th, from 12-7pm. The festival focuses on curatorial experimentation and collaboration. There will be over 50 shows, including the work of over 400 individual artists, in spaces ranging from galleries to studios to apartments to mobile trucks to Smartphone apps!

We invited artists and creative others from aroundthe world to cut, dub, reverse, add to, and otherwisemanipulate at least one broadcast commercial andsubmit a 60 second video.

Add a critical element to the exhibition by helping usdetermine the best works. The top five finalists willhave their work shown on a public screen inManhattan, and the winner will receive a$2,000 cash prize.

apexart from November 10 - December 22, 2010,with an opening reception on Wed., November 10, 6-8 pm.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Friday, October 29, 2010

SThThe Push Pops are happy to announce that the video "LAND ON THE MOON" has been selected to be screened in SanctionedArrayREENING AT 30 ft x 16.5 ftVideos screened at BIG SCREEN PROJECT on October 25th 2010, 5:00 - 9:00 P

SanctionedArray is an online database of video art conceived in response to the restrictions placed on artist submissions to The Guggenheim Museum and YouTube's video biennial, Play. Artist submissions to Play are limited by OFAC sanctions—citizens or residents of Belarus, Cote d'Ivoire, Congo, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar/Burma, and Zimbabwe are not eligible to submit their work. We maintain that the application of OFAC sanctions to virtual transmissions of video art perpetuates the conditions that led to the imposition of these sanctions; those who wish to protest the continuity of such restrictions — artists of any origin, including those from the sanctioned countries — are invited to submit their work to SanctionedArray.

We hope to showcase the most notable and varied video works from creators anywhere. Submission of virtual entries to SanctionedArray follow online video formats proposed by YouTube and the Guggenheim, with the exception of item 1.d. under Eligibility (https://sites.google.com/site/ytplayterms/all). One hundred videos will be selected for the online database. A large number of invited art professionals shall serve as jurors in SanctionedArray by rating the online entries in a process and open source code created and generously provided to us by apexart. The selection criteria are not predetermined in the call for submissions, and will be calibrated by jurors in the process of selection.

SanctionedArray selected video entries shall also be launched on October 25th, 2010 at The Big Screen Project. This event shall coincide with the Play biennial at the Guggenheim, providing representation of video works considered not eligible by origin as determined by YouTube and the Guggenheim, and challenging a status quo as proposed by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Guggenheim Museum.REENING AT 30 ft x 16.5 ft:ideos screened at BIG SCREEN PROJECT on October 25th 2010, 5:00 - 9:00 PM,

Monday, October 18, 2010

The Push Pops Land on the Moon, The Push Pop Collective's third interdisciplinary performance, took place in two parts on September 11th, 2010. Through a ritual reclaiming of the universal territory known as the moon, the Push Pops sang in English, Spanish and Russian, erasing history and erecting a new state of consciousness as they become the very first human beings to land and discover this unique and mysterious lunar terrain. Fugitives of gravity, The Push Pops land on the moon wielding a hybrid red white and blue flag, a diamond-shaped amalgam of the flags of their respective countries oforigin - Russia, Chile and the United States. The Push Pops Land on the Moon in a gesture of co-ownership, co-authorship and radical multiplicity. Landing in tandem to footage of Armstrong's fictitious voyage, the Push Pop's skirt media dissolution, projecting a powerful neo-narrative onto a cross cultural blind spot. Characteristically utopic and feminist, this project erects a matrix of important questions concerning the content of border zones, behaviors, bodies and territories in space. Who sings the nation state? Who sings the universe? Who sings the moon? Following the planting of their flag the Push Pops zoom back to earth for a ceremonial parade on the L train from 8th Ave. to Brooklyn.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The Push Pops Land on the Moon, The Push Pop Collective’s third interdisciplinary performance, will take place in two parts on September 11, 2010. Through a ritual reclaiming of the universal territory known as the moon, the Push Pops sing in English, Spanish and Russian, erasing history and erecting a new state of consciousness as they become the very first human beings to land and discover this unique and mysterious lunar terrain. Fugitives of gravity, The Push Pops land on the moon wielding a hybrid red white and blue flag, a diamond-shaped amalgam of the flags of their respective countries of

origin - Russia, Chile and the United States. The Push Pops Land on the Moon in a gesture of co-ownership, co-authorship and radical multiplicity. Landing in tandem to footage of Armstrong's fictitious voyage, the Push Pop's skirt media dissolution, projecting a powerful neo-narrative onto a cross cultural blind spot. Characteristically utopic and feminist, this project erects a matrix of important questions concerning the content of border zones, behaviors, bodies and territories in space. Who sings the nation state? Who sings the universe? Who sings the moon? Following the planting of their flag the

Push Pops zoom back to earth for a ceremonial parade through the New York City subway system. Please join the Push Pops on September 11th at 11pm when they will take the L train from 8th Ave. in Manhattan to Brooklyn, infinity, and beyond!

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Proselytizing to their bewildered public about a carb-free, carefree, guilt-free Aerobic Utopia, during the Figment arts festival on Governor’s Island the Push Pops performed at the foot of a massive bagel hill with embedded 2-channel video installation featuring the original Buns of Steel Series. Over the racket of Buns of Steel® could be heard a doctored soundtrack including Bjork, MIA, Rhianna, Janet Jackson and the Push Pops themselves. For three 8-hour sessions, the Push Pops – renamed Crystal, Sapphire and Diamond - perfected their desultory workout on a constructed beach tableau complete with a custom umbrella and ice cold refreshments from Aerobic Utopia’s fictive sponsor, America’s No. 1 Fitness beverage, Crystal Light.

As witness to the Push Pops aerobic psychomachy, viewers were accosted by the jocular cries of an anti-consumerist ritual obscured by retro infomercial style nutrition and exercise jargon. Bagels! Bagel Buns! You’re Almost There! This is the first day of a whole new you! This is not a diet this is lifestyle! Exercise is not a sin!... went the Push Pop’s radical word salad. A rotating Nazi drill sergeant style “Aerobitician on Duty” led the group, interspersing her commands with deadpan readings from glossy celebrity fitness manuals (The Nucleus of my figure is my stomach – I have a flat and tight tummy. I stay away from anything with the word cream in it. Just substitute the word fat for cream - ice fat, fat cheese, whipped fat - and giving it up will be quite easy!) and fiercely delivered public confessionals (We were in love! Raise your hand if you ate fruit for breakfast? I am not my anxiety!)

On the third day, with thighs soar as hell and throats raw from polemicizing, the Push Pops ceremoniously covered the bagel hill during the onset of storm, switched on the megaphone siren and led a gaggle of screaming little girls around the hill in hysterical circles yelling “Bagels! No more bagels!” With Gav Baby close behind on the camera, the Push Pops spontaneously took their Utopia on foot to festival goers. “Aerobic Utopia Emigration” began with an impromptu jog around the island, greeting passersby with loud calls of protest, anger, heresy, waving the handmade sequin Bagel Bun flag high, all candy colored lycra and feminist joie de vivre.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Call for participants for the Push Pop Collective’s “Aerobic Utopia” performance at Figment, Governor’s Island June 11, 12, and 13.

Part therapeutic shout-out, part anti-consumerist ritual, part feminist music video and all Utopia! Join members of the all-female Push Pop Collective as we create a collective discursive space; mobilizing against Western liberal ideology that posits femaleness as possessively individual and perpetually consumer. Squat, kick, sing and pummel your way through mounds of day-old bagels and self-loathing, grooving to the original Buns of Steel Series.

Leotards, Day-Glo, LA Gear and barrel bangs highly encouraged. Consult with our Aerobitician on duty about your healthcare regimen or enjoy an ice cold glass of Crystal Light for less than a dollar! Come out and shout out – to Bagel Buns!

Friday, May 28, 2010

At the onset of another hot and sticky New York summer, The Push Pops Collective will give a two-day presentation on the best way to cut carbs and get those tight buns for the bikini season! Powered by the proven methodology of the Buns of Steel series, The Push Pops will provide free personal training and diet advice to Figment participants. As part of Aerobic Utopia, The Push Pops will construct a giant pile of day-old bagels and rolls, collected in the weeks leading to Figment. Next to this symbolic victoryhill, brightly clad Push Pops will lead several aerobic sessions to celebrate triumph over food addictions and unhealthy consumerist tendencies. The Bagel Hill will also raise awareness for the daily food waste occurring in this city.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

In their 2010 performance Taped, the Push Pops make a surprise visit to Portia Munson’s Pink Project, an arrangement of 2,000 pink objects Munson first exhibited during the New Museum's Bad Girls show organized by Marcia Tucker in 1994.

The performance began with a raucously spirited procession from the Push Pop Headquarters to PPOW Gallery in Chelsea. Dressed in hot pink and orange, the collective proceeded West, waving a flag and singing their characteristically oblique idiom. Confronted with Munson’s monumental piece, the Push Pops rolled around the periphery of the work bound together by pink and orange masking tape. While Munson’s piece makes an appropriately 3rd wave subversive gesture - exposing a kind of hyper feminine excess, deifying the calcified remains of the fetishized pink lot – the Push Pop’s intervention marks an important instance of reactivation of Munson’s original concern. Twirling in technicolor motion and reminiscent of a spring bouquet, popsicles or music box dolls, the Push Pops resemble the plasticity and stasis of the pink products, meanwhile, assert a new paradigm of bodily independence through their implacable physicality and equivocal cries. The Push Pops are taped, bound, tied, tethered… but only to one another.